Let’s begin with Judy Erwin, former IL lawmaker busted last year for conducting campaign business while on the governement clock. In other words, during Barak Obama’s campaign in 2008 she was getting paid by non-partisan taxpayers to work on a partisan campaign. A big no-no, which not only got her fined and fired but she also was made to promise never again to work for the state of IL.

All of this came to light last summer.

But things get busy and it’s easy to forget promises made in the bliss of summer, especially those that come with a fine and losing your job. Why should we wonder at her paid position on newly elected Rahm Emanuel’s transition team? This was a political explosion that even Rahm recognized needed swift attention.

Next we’ll move to Rahm’s campaign theme of ethical reform… Rahm Emanuel… the guy who needed a state supreme court decision to calculate just how much he bent the residency law to legally make the Chicago ballot.

Put it this way – Rahm Emanuel is to ethics like Hollywood is to Christianity. Any attempt to even pretend there’s a connection will only convince those who are either incredibly foolish or who truly want to be fooled.

Which brings me and my battered California ego to ask the question, “Who the hell voted for this guy… based on ETHICS?!!” And the only reason I mention California is because the rest of the nation wonders at why we still vote the same incumbents into office despite the obvious disaster that sticks to their hands (see 2nd time gov Jerry Brown and Sen. Barbara Boxer, teacher and public employee unions).

Sorry – I just have to take a shot at Hollywood liberals who drank the global warming kool-aid. Expected high temps will be in the 50s…

Such a high temperature is more than 10 degrees below normal, making this one of the coldest red carpet ceremonies in Oscar history. In fact, the forecast high of 56 is just two degrees above the record for lowest high temperature for the date.

Without sounding too bitter, I hope you freeze your silicon butts off in those designer fashions on the red carpet.

More double standards from a press that is so blind to their blindness that it’s almost funny – except it’s not.

Choice quote:

When it comes to the Tea Party, network correspondents seem to enjoy playing “civility cop,” emphasizing a few radical and inflammatory signs in ways that imply that the entire cause is extreme. Radical and inflammatory signs were easily found at the Wisconsin protests, but the networks uttered not one peep of disapproval — overwhelming evidence of a double standard that should embarrass any network journalist who still purports to be fair and balanced.

So let’s face it – the idea of an objective unbiased news source was a myth all along. We have NEVER had an unbiased media, and if you’re watching the evening news on TV or reading a daily paper in the morning, you better know who’s doing the writing and what their political views are.

In light of that, I would much rather know the politics of a news source as a backdrop to their story. Reporters who DON’T exaggerate their political opponents score high marks – those that do are discounted accordingly.

Think about it – according to our unbiased press the greatest threat to modern feminism is Sarah Palin.

Regarding the status of women in the middle east, I’ll defer to this opinion:

Identity politics revolve around the narrative of victimization. For adherents to identity politics, the victim is not a person, but a member of a privileged victim group. That is, the status of victimhood is not determined by facts, but by membership in an identity group. Stories about victims are not dictated by facts. Victim stories are tailored to fit the victim. Facts, values and individual responsibility are all irrelevant.

In light of this, a person’s membership in specific victim groups is far more important than his behavior. And there is a clear pecking order of victimhood in identity politics.

Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.

After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals. [Editorial Note: I would add the environment to this list.]

Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering.

Towards the end the truth is summarized:

Identity politics are nothing more than socially acceptable bigotry. Those who practice them are racist bigots who have replaced liberal values that hold everyone to the same moral and criminal standards with illiberal values that judge people’s morality and criminality by the identity group with which they are most readily associated.

When we understand identity politics, we understand how it is that the wholesale assaults against foreign journalists have received so little analysis. Lara Logan and the other hundred reporters attacked in Tahrir Square are real victims, not because of who they are, but because of what happened to them. The Egyptians who attacked them are real criminals, not because of who they are, but because of what they did.

I never thought someone could make such a speech to an audience of liberals and live to tell about it. The speaker is Jonathan Haidt at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention, and here’s the political make up of his audience:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

And his observation to them:

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal… Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Read it all, but here’s the kicker. After absorbing this body blow, Dr. Haidt challenged the executive committee to endorse a goal of “10% conservative membership by 2020.”

Wow… 10%. That’s the most unbalanced representation of reality by people charged with having a hold on such. Physicians, heal yourselves!